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LOPSA Mentorship & Monitoring

I’m THIS excited!

Recently someone asked on the lopsa-mentorship lists for some help with improving the monitoring for the community project he works for.

The one whose logo above _everyone_ knows 🙂

I offered to help since, well, monitoring!

Now I’m waiting to get in touch and then answer / guide him with any monitoring issues he finds.

Waiting. Excitedly. I already prepped a page of questions. Can’t wait. So excited.

I hope we can settle on Check_MK instead of anything outdated, but we’ll see. Not gonna push something on him, there are more interesting questions than what software to use.

i.e. identifying the actual services provided, seeing their dependencies (i.e. if a build of this piece fails today, there’s no new version for next week), and since I’ll not be the person doing the work, it’ll be a much bigger challenge:

Finding the essence of why and how to monitor what.

About LOPSA Mentorship:

The league of professional sysadmins (LOPSA) has a mentorship program, where beginning sysadmins or such starting into a new topic can ask for help. This dates back to when things were called system administrators guild (SAGE).

I remember I wrote there looking for help back in 2001/2002 when I got my first “serious” sysadmin job. I checked the options “hundreds of servers” “production” “lack of prior experience” and something like “HELP!”. Noone replied.

I joined the mentorship program to help people not have this happen again.

About LOPSA:

LOPSA itself is the largest standing organization of system administrators.

It offers exchange of ideas and practices. This is extremely helpful for professional sysadmins, since we normally don’t have anyone outside of our current gig to compare our ideas with. And normally we tackle more complex tasks than most “DevOps” scenarios cover, so looking out on the internet will also just send you crying. LOPSA fills the gap, getting you in touch with more experienced and fresh sysadmins in an informal way.
Beyond that it also guides by setting some rules i.e. with a Code of Ethics.

The latter I’ve translated to german – so I’m quite bound by the code of ethics. 🙂